After surging very impressively this year, silver has since collapsed sharply. Prices are now hovering around $80 per ounce, down from peaks near $120 just days earlier. The violent move also reignited debate over whether silver’s boom was a speculative blow-off — and whether an even deeper drop lies ahead.
Silver price per ounce today (Source: CoinCodex)
Former JPMorgan chief strategist Marko Kolanovic took a starkly bearish stance, and warned that silver is “almost guaranteed” to fall around 50% within a year. That would imply prices closer to the $40 range.
Critics also argue the crash wasn’t purely organic. JPMorgan Chase & Co. sits at the center of the silver futures market and even previously paid $920 million in fines for manipulating precious metals markets between 2008 and 2016.
While no new wrongdoing has been proven, the structure of today’s paper-heavy silver market allows large, well-capitalized players to benefit when margin calls force others out.
Most silver trading occurs through futures contracts, not physical metal. During the latest plunge, physical silver prices in Shanghai reportedly stayed far higher than US paper prices, suggesting demand never vanished — only leveraged positioning did.
Kolanovic’s warning isn’t that silver is worthless. It’s that silver behaves like gold with leverage, and leverage unwinds brutally. A 50% drop wouldn’t end the bull story — but it could be the shakeout that resets it.
